Ten-year-old hacker finds flaw in mobile games

A ten-year-old hacker has found a flaw in a number of mobile games which could open an exploitable loophole.

The pre-teen girl, who uses the name CyFi, presented her findings at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas this weekend.

She yold attendees that she became bored with waiting for crops to grow in an un-named farming game so decided to fiddle about with the system clock to see if she could speed things up a bit.

Although most games of this ilk use Internet-based security checks to prevent such hacks, the girl found that temporarily disconnecting the device's Wi-Fi connection allowed her to open up the game to a bit of time travel. It also put the software in a state it makers hadn't foreseen, opening it to various other dodgy activities.

Details about what can be achieved by opening the flaw were not revealed the BBC reports, in order to give creators of the apps, for both iOS and Android devices, time to close the holes.